1. Field
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for attenuating noise from a fan exhaust of a computer system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for attenuating fan noise through turbulence mitigation.
2. Related Art
As predicted by Moore's Law, integrated circuit (IC) performance continues to increase at an exponential rate. However, these performance improvements have given rise to problems with power consumption and heat dissipation. This has created a demand for innovative cooling systems that can dissipate the large amounts of heat generated by modern ICs. The resulting improvements in cooling technology have allowed such cooling systems to keep up with ICs, albeit at an added cost and with a number of undesirable consequences.
In particular, the fans used to cool high-performance computer systems, such as servers, mainframes, and supercomputers, have become larger, more numerous, and more powerful to compensate for the increased heat generated by the machines' hardware components. In turn, the fans themselves produce more acoustic noise than previous generations of fans. As a result, a data center that is densely packed with high-performance machines may generate enough noise to create problems for humans in the data center. For example, service engineers may have difficulty communicating with one another in the data center and may also have difficulty concentrating on configuring and/or troubleshooting the machines. Such distractions due to increased fan noise may also cause no trouble found (NTF) issues, resulting in reduced profit margins, increased costs, and eroded brand value. Thus, mitigating fan noise can help to prevent errors and increase performance while servicing such computer systems.